So, hoping to take advantage of this particular discussion, any resources you'd recommend to help someone wrap his head around this (file organization)? Brand new mac user and this is the thing I myself am struggling with. I do seem to be able to organize folders similar to how I did on Windows, but I keep getting the feeling that's not as critical on a Mac.
I'm trying to think of an online "one-stop shop" for Mac orientation besides workshops at Apple Stores. Apple used to have a section of their site in the early 2000's with a lot of short tutorial videos, all geared for switchers who wanted to do regular things.
For the most part, the Mac still uses a very physical metaphor. When I started showing my aunt Control Center (swipe up with three fingers [default] and you can put apps in different Desktops), she was having trouble wrapping her head around it until I described it like, say, "Desktop 1 can be the dining room table, Desktop 2 can be the home office desk," etc.
If you're like my mother and clutter up the dining room table with all kinds of papers and books, you might clutter your Mac's desktop with documents and apps and folders full of movie clips and subfolders of image files and on and on and on. She was even "backing up" her files by making duplicates in duplicate folders -- once we realized what she was doing, which was essentially doubling the occupied space on her HD while having zero protection if the drive failed, it took a lot of work to explain the predicament she had created.
But, because of its UNIX background, the Mac OS does a few things in a very computer-y way, namely with the placement of Applications and all their support files and with the User account.
Check Youtube for "Apple switcher tutorial videos" and you'll get a few good ones (at least that's how it appears to me; not in a position to watch them at the moment).
I'd also say to look around System Preferences for a while. Check out the Trackpad pane for multitouch gestures, and also things like Mission Control and Accessibility.
If you're afraid of losing your own files, you can create another User account (System Preferences -> Users & Groups, then click the "+" sign in the lower left at the bottom of the user list) and try things out.
At a general level, and as concisely as I can, here's what I'd say:
- Home folder: This is all your personal stuff. You can put it in the Sidebar by going to Finder -> Preferences. You can treat this pretty much like your own storage area.
- iTunes, Photos, etc: I treat these like file organizers -- or assistants, or secretaries, or something like that. It's as if, when I drag music to keep in iTunes onto the iTunes window's sidebar, iTunes takes it and copies it into its own private filing cabinet. That "cabinet" is the iTunes folder, which resides in my Music folder. Same thing with Photos, GarageBand, and others. If I want to find files in iTunes and copy them somewhere else (like onto a USB stick), I don't go into the file system -- I drag them out of the iTunes window itself.
For the most part, I have iTunes do the retrieving, storage, and organization for me.
- Applications folder -- and everything at directory levels higher than my Home folder: The only one of these I bother touching is Applications, and that's when I'm either installing or deleting apps from my computer. Installing means either using an installer or copying the app into Applications; uninstalling means dragging them out of Applications and into the trash. Most apps are really well self-contained and aren't sticking small files into every crevice of the OS.
